The problem with public transportation has very little to do with the paths of the buses.
[we interrupt the “Friend’s Prompts” series for this casual aside…]
I ride the bus nearly every day — to work, sometimes back to home, often to run errands — because I do not have a car. This was a voluntary choice I made a few years ago, and it was honestly a great choice overall. I live without forking over money for a car payment, car insurance, car maintenance, or fuel. I have at this point not spent thousands of dollars because of public transportation.
But like everyone who relies on the buses here, I also curse the damn things a lot. As I wrote to a friend, once: “This is not Germany or Japan. The bus drivers make their own time and you have to allow for early, late, and non-existent buses.” There are also very few bus stops with coverings or seats…in Florida, where the sun is deadly and rain is frequent. Okay. Thanks.
Every few years StarMetro re-designs routes. They had a major switch over back in 2014, which honestly did zero to improve service. It’s easy to wonder what the hell the urban transportation designers think they are doing, because it all seems pretty haphazard from the end-user standpoint.
But then I read an article like this one at CityLab: “The ‘Tortured Transit’ of Bus Routes” and I just have to sigh heavily. Yes, I agree, some routes are ridiculously convoluted. I know that from hard-won experience.
The solution, though, is not to straighten them out. Doing so will strand some riders, inconvenience others, and make very little difference to scheduling. That is a statement I stand behind with every dollar to my name. I guarantee it.
The solution is also not just “more of the same” OR “throw money at it.” A higher budget would help, sure — more buses, more drivers would instantly mean that routes could become more frequent, and even expanded (“straightened out” or not). I’m 100% in support of our city making public transportation a higher priority in the budget, especially if that means covered bus stops.
But more of the same also means more of the same problems. Straightening out the routes and/or making them more frequent is not going to solve the overall problem, which is in a nutshell: access.
The reasons some routes are convoluted is that they cover a major corridor, but there exists a lot of smaller neighborhoods along that corridor and only so many buses to try to get to everyone. Simply straightening out a route would make public transportation nearly impossible for people like the elderly, people with disabilities, people with kids in tow, or anyone who doesn’t want to hike a long way to the bus stop during a thunderstorm (or snowstorm, I guess… what is snow, even???).
One only has to look at major metropolitan areas with decent public transportation to see how things should be designed.
I’ve been on public transportation in Orlando, D.C., San Francisco, Boston, Seattle, and Chicago, and what I realized from those experiences is that the best approach is to have dedicated main-corridor lines (buses or trains) with offshoot bus routes serving smaller areas.
This concept is not rocket science, but it’s limited by how public transportation here in the U.S. is perceived. It was often originally developed solely to get people from suburbs into jobs in “the city” and in smaller cities/towns, was mostly a way for the lower class workers to get around. Public transportation in places that are not major metropolitan areas is viewed as a secondary concern because in the U.S., having a car is a sign of both maturity and upward mobility. Not having a car is practically a mark of failure. (I find that many people who do use public transportation are often quick to point out that they do have a car, they are choosing not to use it for one reason or another.)
The city governments of major metropolitan areas long ago figured out that moving masses of people around is a matter of public health, security, and well-being, whether they spin it that way or not. When they forget that, as New York City has done cyclically throughout its history, the repercussions are fairly brutal for the overall urban environment. That holistic approach to public transportation is in the minority, though, and certainly does not filter down to large towns like Tallahassee, Florida.
There are whole textbooks devoted to this subject and I’m not saying anything I have not actually cribbed from somewhere else. But in all the analysis going on, there is very little talk “on the ground” about how perceptions of public transportation fuels discussions about routes, times, and availability, often negatively.
If we do not view public transportation as a community issue, instead of just a service that the government provides for those less fortunate or as a way to reduce highway congestion, it does not matter how straight and timely the routes are because the fundamental social cost of lacking adequate public transportation isn’t even being acknowledged.